


damn.nation, now available on itunes

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Did You Try Turning the Apocalypse Off and On Again?, Local Demon Goes Investigating, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-07-07 22:54:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19859350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: When lowly tempt-pusher Amphora (formerly of Stairwell 7B North, before she Fell,) gets the notice that end times are nigh, she gleefully quits her job and cancels her Netflix subscription and takes her place among the legions of hell.This, it turns out, was a bad plan.





	damn.nation, now available on itunes

**Author's Note:**

> That sound you just heard was me smashing through several months of depression deadlock like the Kool-Aid Man.
> 
> also, britpicking? i don't know her. proofreading? who's that.
> 
> **Warnings** for bad jokes, and that's it, really.

-

+++

+

+++

-

Amphora’s in the middle of convincing a boy named Skip to go ahead and pocket that ice pop while the van operator’s back is turned — less because she thinks the act will secure the boy’s immortal soul for an eternity in hell and more because she knows it will secure Big Todd’s, as he paid premium price to park on this patch today and is the type to punish the operator for every pound she’s short — when the sliding glass case suddenly goes opaque and her commanding officer materializes on its surface, bellowing, “HAIL SATAN.”

“Ow, ow,” says Amphora, momentarily deafened.

“AMPHORA. I SPOKE UNTO THEE.”

She winces. “Hail Satan.”

“THE TIME HAS COME.”

“I’m in the middle of something.”

“FORSAKE THY MONSTROUS FLESH AND TAKE UP SHIELD AND ARMS —“

“Why are you yelling —”

“— IN THE NAME OF THE PRINCE OF HELL, OUR LORD BEEZLEBUB —“

“— you don’t have to yell, I’m standing right —“

“FOR THE END TIMES ARE UPON US AND WE ARE AT WAR.”

“Oh,” she says, and somewhere to her left, Skip takes the ice pop, counts the money, and hands it to the van operator without even once entertaining the idea of nicking it. There probably wasn’t hope for him anyway. “Well, why didn’t you _say_ so?”

+++

She’s given orders to report in by sundown.

There’s a certain amount of contentment that comes with the knowledge that you will never have to face the consequences of what you’re about to do next, familiar to all the future David Cameron types who’ve ever stood outside a pig pen and thought, “there’s no way this could end badly for me.” 

So, realizing that imminent deployment into the legions of hell is a card she can only play once, Amphora goes in to flip two fingers to her project manager, who doesn’t think that’s in the _least_ bit original, at least until she descends into the garage and finds an ACME anvil smashed right into the bonnet of her car, after which Amphora returns home and miracles herself a bunch of paint so she can completely ruin her chance of ever getting the deposit back on her flat.

In honesty, though, it’s a little redundant — for her landlord especially. His soul had been damned long before she came along. Most are. She doesn’t think they let you be a landlord without it.

Still, she decides, as she steps back to survey her handiwork, lifting her foot out of the way to let the Roomba trundle by. It’ll have to do. No one can do their best work on short notice like this.

Shoving her helmet down over her ears, she drags in a deep breath — and goes to find a grave to jump into.

+++

Forty-eight hours later, she drags herself hand-over-hand out of the dirt and looks across the river at the construction cranes perched over the wharf at Battersea. The headlights swing left and right on the road. She pulls an earthworm from her tongue.

“Shit,” she says, succinctly. “That was pointless.”

+++

Amphora came to London a hundred and fifty years ago, settled in Chelsea and never left. In that time, she’s watched the neighborhood turn over from bankers to other bankers to more bankers — plus a few football players, trust fund babies with Ascot hats surgically attached, and one _Bake-Off_ finalist, for variety. She’s held on to her real estate by sheer virtue of the fact that no one, no one, _no one_ does paperwork the way they do paperwork in the nine circles. It hardly even counts as a miracle; humans just haven’t unlocked the true potential of a good stack of triplicates yet.

Point is, she’s not used to this.

“I have to start from scratch, Smalls,” she complains, tilting her phone up so her face is visible through the glare. “I’m not happy about it.”

Skype lags, pixelates, and coalesces again into a pinched, frowning face.

“Right,” she says. “Do you know what happened yet?”

“…” says Smalls.

“Yeah, dumb question. Is anyone talking? Someone _has_ to be talking. One minute it was all the legions gathered together, writing rude words on our teeth and trying to figure out which way the adjustable straps go — no, they’re not that difficult, you should try one of those posh strappy bras sometime— and the next, it was ‘return all weapons to the armory’ and ‘punch your time cards, you maggots’.”

“…” says Smalls.

“Lord Beezlebub said we were betrayed. Which, uh, that’s not —“

Smalls makes a subvocal noise.

“— oh, sorry,” and Amphora lifts her phone again, making sure her face is framed so he can see her mouth. She wishes they could use another program, but Satan’s contract with Skype doesn’t end for another ten years, so. “But that isn’t an explanation. We were betrayed. Whatever,” she wrinkles her nose. “That’s just a normal day in hell. You betrayed me twice before breakfast.”

Smalls’s eyebrows pop up inquisitively.

“Yes,” Amphora allows. “I saw that. That was very clever.”

His lipless mouth twitches, suppressing a pleased smile.

“But it’s the end days! Or it’s … supposed to be? How do you … just mess something like that up? Was there a scheduling conflict?” She hikes her tote back up onto her shoulder, and ploughs through a group of joggers, making them all scatter around her with sharp exclamations. The round edge of the tote’s contents bang against her ribs. “Did the angels forget they’d already booked a nail salon for this week and couldn’t do a holy war at the same time? Did _we_ forget we booked a nail salon?”

He snorts, and makes a show of examining his stubby, filthy fingertips.

“Hey, that takes _maintenance._ Do you think you can find out?”

A shrug.

“Right, well. Keep an ear out, will you? Oh — sor — you know what I mean,” she says quickly, when Smalls gives her a droll look. “I’ve got to go. I think I found something.”

She cuts the Skype call, slipping her phone inside her jacket, where it sighs and migrates to her back pocket since that’s the next place she’ll automatically check for it. She looks left, then right. The whole street is walled off to cut down on noise pollution, with clean, rose-colored stone broken up by gates and brass placards and bulky intercom systems. The one beside her tells her a lot about establishment dates and about trespassers, but contains one very important word: seminary.

“This will do,” she says to her tote, giving it a pat. “I don’t _think_ it’s occupied by any one of ours?”

She turns sideways, and the next moment is inside and half-way up the drive. No one will notice her. No one ever has; at cursory inspection, Amphora looks like any other mid-forties female visitor in matching denim and sensible shoes. It’s only at closer inspection that she becomes stranger; the upturned, squashed nose and unpleasantly squinted eyes, the oddity of her ears and teeth. Fortunately, it tends to just be children who see those things, and they’re quickly hushed. Older humans are taught prejudice, a demon’s best friend.

The buildings at the end of the drive are tall, interlocking, and decorated with such … _tasteful_ amounts of ivy that she hears herself saying "bleh" repeatedly as she walks. The doors stand open, letting a cross-breeze through. As she passes one, she flicks an ear towards the sound of the tabletop fan whirring inside. Not that building. Humans in that one.

Circling around back, she scans at the roofline until she finds what she’s looking for: a drainpipe and a promising spot under the eaves. She plants her feet, shifts her tote, and scrambles up, wedging herself into place where the roof meets the gutters. She shoves her head in and barks out a burst of sound, listening to the ricochet and the shape it makes between her ears.

Her lips peel up. Perfect.

There’s an attic crawlspace forgotten about up here, gloomy and infested with spiderwebs and the nascent beginnings of a nasty mold problem. Old roofing tiles make stacks in one corner that she’ll be able to turn into furniture-shapes. There isn’t enough space between floor and ceiling for her to make a roost, but it’s not necessary. It’ll do, at least until she gets a new housing voucher from Allocation Services. It’s the least they can do, after that cock-up.

Best yet, this isn’t one of the occupied buildings. Amphora would rather move to Westminster and try to live in the belfry of St. Paul’s before she’d willingly submit to occupying space with another being again.

Well, almost.

After one last survey, she opens her tote and takes out its sole occupant. The Roomba beeps as she sets it down.

“Couldn’t leave you behind,” she says, and gets to work.

+++

Seminaries are a common place to find young demons, because unless someone’s been particularly overzealous, the areas outside the chapel aren’t _technically_ holy ground.

Amphora’s developed a knack for spotting the newly Fallen, the way you do when you’ve only just stopped being newly Fallen yourself. It’s the obsession with priests, see, and the temptation thereof. New demons always, _always_ go honing in on the holy orders, like they’ve only got the one idea of what demons are supposed to do and are absolutely committed to doing it — which is more how an angel would approach it, if you think about it.

But it doesn’t take a demon to tempt a priest these days. All you really need is the right sub-Reddit and a few well-angled Instagram posts. None of that cock-and-ball torture of the old days. The priesthood got efficient. They do that on their own now.

Amphora wakes up at sundown to find a notification on her damn.nation app that her quota’s been reset.

“Shit,” she complains, shoving roofing tiles aside.

“Grahaha,” something says.

She bolts upright. The Roomba’s charging in its dock, and beside it — 

“Gripe!” Amphora says happily, and mentally adjusts her tally of beings she is willing to have in her twenty-foot radius of personal space. The Roomba, and this vaguely incorporeal collection of dust, atoms, and bad attitude that she’s given the name of Gripe. Imps do a really good job mimicking the complaining of humans. 

Imps fall under hell’s jurisdiction only because nobody else wanted them, in the same way that earthworms are part of the insect kingdom because theirs was the kingdom that didn’t say no fast enough. They’ve been around since before the Almighty got the itch to play with the primordial Play-Doh, and even humans are aware of them, kind of. They’re what make you forget why you entered a room as soon as you cross a threshold. They like eating thoughts.

Amphora doesn’t have many thoughts she wouldn’t miss, so they get along, mostly.

“I didn’t realize you would follow me,” she says now, and an abstract impression of teeth happen in her direction. “Still, I’ve got to go. Work to do and all that.”

She waves her phone, the damn.nation app still open.

“Get this — they recalled all denizens of hell to commit us to the war to end all wars, yeah, and then after _they_ drop the ball, they send tetchy messages to remind us _we’re_ behind on securing souls for our dark master. How’s that for typical?”

“Gragghaha,” says Gripe, with professional sympathy.

+++

She stops at Tesco’s first, because where better if you’re going to cruise for vulnerable souls, and if the world hasn’t actively been consumed by hellfire then she might as well get a sandwich.

Sidling sideways through the doors, she tries to brace herself, but nothing will truly prepare her for that first blast of frigid aircon. She’s still grimacing about it when she notices the atmosphere, tense and annoyed, and comes to attention.

"Ah," she says.

All the registers are down except for one, and the queue’s gone past the liquor and is nearly encroaching on the day-old breads. She’s not the only one behind on her quota, she realizes.

Crowley’s been here.

It has to be, because you can’t live in London without recognizing Crowley’s handiwork when you see it.

Amphora will be the first to admit she doesn’t always … get it. He’s unsettling. (Yes, yes, the nine circles are still all atwitter about WW2, but if he’d been the mastermind behind that then _surely_ he would have bothered to make sure all the bombing happened to _other_ cities? He was as homeless as Amphora had been, for awhile, and that just doesn’t seem like the level of planning she’d expect from someone who got a shiny badge of commendation for creating the Third Reich. Not to say she thinks he _didn’t_ do it, it’s just … she’s kind of saying he didn’t do it.)

But he seems proud of little stuff like this, and it’s not like she won’t take advantage when the opportunity arises.

After all, create an environment of such irritating, pervasive inconvenience and misery, and then stand back as humans find ways to blame other humans for it, and they can’t even _really_ claim that you pushed them. It had nothing to do with you being a wily devil, you. They picked that evil all on their own, just because they had a bit of a wait at Tesco’s. The nine circles are big on that, the _choosing._

Amphora goes slouching through the aisles, opening packages and putting them back and removing things from the freezer cases to leave them out and making sure the politely queued people see her do it. They become less politely queued. The miasma grows.

Still. There’s something — 

She swivels an ear. 

“— power failure. Do you think it has something to do with what happened on Saturday?”

A shift, a sudden curiosity. “What happened on Saturday?”

“I — dunno — exactly. You know? It’s boffo, like, my aunt called and said her car had been in an accident, yeah, just absolutely lit on fire on the motorway. I _absolutely_ remember her — oi, mate, queue starts back there, _yeah,_ I’m serious — remember her screaming and crying about how she’d barely escaped, but I just came from there this morning and there it was in the lot. Not on fire.”

“That’s bonkers.”

“ _Absolutely_ bonkers. You know what I’m talking about, right?”

“Yeah. Mum thinks we experienced a solar flare.”

“Might explain the registers. But the M25, though? _Just_ the M25?”

“Well, when you put it like _that.”_

Amphora turns her head. Two young people at the back are finding a connection. The possibility that expands between them — it could be friendship, lifelong, support and love and care, the foundation is there and ready if they choose it — is like aluminum foil in her teeth. The miasma shrinks. Something good is going to come out of this bad.

She won’t meet her quota here today.

Cutting her losses, she picks a sandwich and jumps the queue completely, like the absolute agent of chaos she is. As she leaves the aircon, it hits her what, exactly, is so unsettling about Crowley. It’s that so much of his work contains just enough of a blessing, too, that it somehow accomplishes both, the evil and the good.

Which is … not good behavior, for a demon. And it’s not like he doesn’t know what he’s doing! He’s been around since the time the Almighty discovered that hydrogen makes a delightfully loud noise when collided with other particles. He should know better.

Whatever. Not her pay grade.

+++

Her commanding officer’s waiting for her just inside the turnstiles.

“HAIL SATAN,” is roared as soon as she comes into view.

She flinches, putting her ears back. “Hail Satan.”

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like the excitable all-caps is going to become a permanent habit. “Amphora!” The volume downgrades a level. “It Is Time For Thou to Recount Thy Deeds — Firstly, No Change in How Thou Identifies?”

_Fall Out Boy has nothing on you,_ she thinks.

“No change,” she confirms.

To be fair, she has no room to talk. Once known as the One Who Holds the Amphora of Oil for the Anointed Ones at the End of Stairwell 7B North (not to be confused with her partner, One Who Holds the Cistern for Ablutions at the End of Stairwell 7B North, who was a right tit and never trimmed their holy nose hairs, which she supposes now was a result of bending over feet for eternity but had been quite insufferable at the time. There was a pair like them at every entrance to heaven, anointing the heads and washing the feet of the arriving hosts of the divine, and Amphora genuinely has no idea what they did after she Fell,) her one guiding notion for choosing her demonic name had been simplicity. She might change it in a century or two.

She picks at the flaps of her nose. 

“Is it just us?”

“And The Earthworm That Writhes Abased at Thine Feet.”

“Oh, hey, Smalls,” she says happily. “Didn’t see you there.”

Smalls gives her a thin smile. 

He looks, as he always has, _incomplete:_ whitish, thin, his face sagging and dragging like someone had made a human shape out of wax and then partially melted it. He lasted far longer as an angel than she ever thought he would, but when _The Sound of Music_ came out on tape, that was it for him, and he steepled his hands and swan-dove right into the sulphur to get away from it. He hasn’t bothered to construct himself a pair of ears in any form he’s had since. Doesn’t want to run the risk, he says.

She turns to give him a clearer view of her mouth when she speaks. “Did you find anything out?”

He shrugs.

She looks at her commanding officer. “What about you? You outrank us. Surely you’ve got a better idea of why Armageddon got called off.”

“Joy Unto Me That Thou Think I Am Communicated With At All,” says the voice of mid-level managers everywhere.

“Well, I don’t understand how it could have gone wrong. Everything was going right, wasn’t it? We all got the same updates. Antichrist? Growing up evil. Fantastically evil. Those were the words. _Fantastically_ evil. Hell hound? Fine. World leaders? At each other’s throats. Everything? In place. We were waiting for the gates of hell to open. And then?” she spreads her hands, and lets out a flatulent noise. “Nothing.”

Her commanding officer … squirms. “We Have Reason to Believe an Angel Thwarted Our Efforts.”

Amphora and Smalls stand up straighter. That’s news! That’s dastardly! That’s —

Wait.

She frowns. “Prince Beezlebub said _we_ were betrayed.” Smalls gestures, and she points at him. “He’s right. How could an angel betray _us?”_

Definite squirming. “That Investigation Ended Inconclusively.”

“You _do_ know!” Amphora cries, indignant. Then her ears come forward. “Hang on. An investigation? Investigations mean paperwork. That means a paper trail. I’ve got to go.”

“Wha — Amphora! Where Art Thou Going!”

“To fill out a form!” she calls over her shoulder, with relish, and disappears down the tunnel towards the Northern line — an unholy commute on good days, and an uncharacteristically convenient entrance into hell on every other.

+++

It turns out the paperwork she needs doesn’t exist. You can’t file paperwork demanding a summation of apocalyptical events and the results of subsequent investigations, because there isn’t a form for it. No one’s ever needed one before. There’s no precedent for psych-out Armageddons. Fake-a-geddons. Fauxgeddons.

Come on, people! The whole _point_ of hell is to undermine heaven’s power, and the best way to make something _less_ sacred is to red-tape it with paperwork.

“And now this!” she complains to Gripe, holding up her phone. “Soho just went on black-out!”

“Grahangha,” says Gripe sleepily.

“It means we aren’t allowed to go there. That’s a blanket ban. How — what — can you _imagine_ Soho without demons?”

“Nnaghn.”

The imp doesn’t sound concerned. The Roomba disengages from its dock with a soft chime and trundles in that direction. The abstract impression of an eye opens warily.

“Nobody is saying anything useful,” Amphora continues. “And I think it’s because nobody knows anything useful. Why _wouldn’t_ we want to go to war with heaven, or them with us? Isn’t that what we’ve been doing, all this time? Only we’ve all gotten lazy and we’re using humans to do it, instead of having a good, proper down-and-out. Us against them.”

The Roomba, sensing dust, swirls in that direction.

Gripe sits up, and says with rising urgency, “Gragnnha?”

“That’s how it was supposed to go. But we were betrayed. And if an angel is involved — then heaven was betrayed, too.”

“Grahahaha!”

The Roomba beeps triumphantly, and begins to clean.

“So if we weren’t — wait.”

Amphora sits up with a snap of her fingers.

“Wait, _wait!_ You know what I need?” She flings herself off the roofing tiles, scuttling for the break where the drainpipe meets the roof. “I need an angel. They’d know! It wouldn’t occur to them to lie!”

She squeezes herself out into the daylight.

“Gragghna,” says Gripe, in resignation.

+++

If finding a newly Fallen demon is as easy as hanging around the holy orders and listening for whoever sounds most desperate to belong, then finding an angel in human guise is nearly impossible.

Nearly.

They like to keep their names, Amphora’s found, but that isn’t as much help as you’d think it’d be.

It’s a game she likes to play called Guess the Angel (finding new ways to entertain oneself in long queues in the nine circles is a constant struggle, okay,) where she’d take a list of angel names mixed in with the names of prescription hemorrhoid creams and see if anyone can spot the difference. Fermosaprine, Cetaphil, Gariphim. Most everybody could only get it right half the time, and the demons who were best at it were the ones who, like her, had to know the names of all the angels anyway, so that doesn’t really count.

Several months ago, Amphora got a promo coupon for a yoga studio in Kensington run exclusively for vegans by someone named Esaphim Standing, and all of the clues came together and said, _Amphora, that sounds like an angel._

It’s the rules, she figures. Living among humans is a massive culture shock for anyone, and keeping to a certain code of conduct makes it feel more like home, at first; the stricter the rules, the better. The more you could do prove you were doing _right,_ the more righteous you were, and the righteous can’t be wrong. That’s the core tenement of being an angel — 

Righteous and divine.

Gross, right?

So Amphora goes. She finds the building, sets herself up in the alley across the street, and just starts to get a really good loiter going when the door opens and a class spills out, all thirty-something human shapes carrying mats and hydration bottles. She stands up straighter.

If angels have an ethereal sense for when a place, thing, or person is loved purely and unconditionally — for when humans do their best to unconsciously mimic the divine — then demons have a sense for the things that damn them. Every human already knows, somewhere inside, what their most condemnable action or thought was. Demons are just good at knowing it, too.

Amphora tilts her head, and listens. 

(He hadn’t told them about the money.)

(She hadn’t believed her — later she would, later she would always believe the victims first, but when Jordan needed her in those hours immediately after, the only thing she could think was, _I don’t know what you expected to happen.)_

(He’d been glad when he heard; the worst thing they would ever live through, and instead of sympathetic, he’d been glad.)

She puts one ear back.

She’s behind on her quota, and these rich young people are perfect —

— because if there’s one thing you pick up about being a demon, it’s that there’s little to be gained by tempting the poor, the people already so close to ruin that it would hardly even take a traffic ticket or a harsh e-mail to have them ready to hand over God, redemption, and their credit card information. And sure, souls are souls, but souls ill-gained are just … not filling. No, it’s the people rich in confidence and comfort, who have the luxury of choosing apathy — that’s where Satan butters his bread. So both angels and demons have a tendency to congregate where wealth and power are, the cities and capitals. There’s a saying somewhere, about how neither side ever sees the other during a war; the angels are all on the battlefield, working miracles, while the demons are behind closed doors, making battlefields — 

— and it would hardly take any effort at all. 

Instagram. It’d be Instagram, she thinks. Pick one of the humans, bolster up their pride until it turns to ego, then have them use that ego to throw shade on those they consider to have an undesirable body shape, or a lifestyle they don’t approve of. Make it a habit. That’d be evil.

There — her. With the anti-animal cruelty pop socket and the self-conscious way of sucking in her stomach.

Amphora crosses the street.

And stops. Hesitates.

_What are you doing?_ she thinks at herself. _You know you can win that soul. You know it._

_Do it!_

But here’s the thing — 

Amphora had been an angel for far, far longer than she’d ever been a demon. To criticize something that had been made in the image of the Almighty is — _unfathomable,_ completely off the table. She’s worked her way up to several sins by now, but she can’t make that human girl be cruel like that.

“Shit,” she says, frustrated, and the yoga class dissolves, scattering in different directions.

Pivoting on her heel, she almost runs directly into the last straggler coming out the door, who vents out a disgruntled noise while sidestepping — then does a double-take, and Amphora knows that they had just seen her, briefly, for what she really was. As if summoned, an imp scampers along the threshold, eager to snap up the memory.

She shoulders past, up the stairs. The yoga studio’s on the very top level.

Of course it is.

“Why do I live here?” she gripes, four flights later. 

Of all the places she could have gone to do Satan’s bidding, why on Earth did she settle on London? It's cramped, drafty, grey — like being permanently stuck in 7B North all over again. But, like, on purpose this time.

Then she enters the studio, and all of that flies right out of her head.

The space is instantly familiar: high, exposed ceilings, monochrome colors and an open floor plan. The positioning of the windows makes her want to scream, the memory of them so near at hand.

There’s only one occupant, seemingly tiny in comparison to all that space, pushing a Swiffer Wetjet over the hardwood floors — and this, too, discombobulates Amphora, because she’s pretty sure you can’t get those here, even at the big Tesco’s. They’ve got on fashion leggings with mesh cut-outs that match the shapes of the windows, cathedral-esque, and their shoes are the weird kind with toes. They spare her only the briefest, dismissive flick of a look, taking her in from her trainers to her denim, slotting her away as middle-aged and invisible.

“Did you forget something?” they start to say, audibly bored, and Amphora steps into the light.

The angel freezes.

Some animal characteristics you can never truly make go away. Crowley’s eyes, for instance, or Smalls’s damp, weeping skin.

Amphora’s squashed nose has too many complicated ridges to be human-passing, but it’s her bat’s ears she’s truly proud of, towering and tall and nearly translucent at their tips. When the whole host of hell was called up, she had to drill holes in her helmet to make it fit, but who else in her legion can echolocate like she can?

“ _Demon,”_ the angel hisses.

The Swiffer comes up with all the dignity of a flaming sword.

They make a gesture in front of them, and — is that a warding-of-evil? How quaint.

“They’ve got a plug-in for that now,” Amphora points out helpfully, stepping further into the studio. All the equipment’s been relegated to a single corner so as not to disrupt the aesthetic, and that’s where she gravitates. “Devil-B-Gone. It comes unscented, and also in frankincense and myrrh.”

Their lip curls. “Wipe your feet, at least.”

“No,” says Amphora, whose only job for millennia had been to do exactly that and who still takes enormous pleasure in never doing it again.

It earns her the kind of look that could flay skin off a rock. Righteous and divine, Amphora thinks, and rolls her eyes.

“What do you want?”

“I was going to ask if you’re Esaphim Standing, but I think I have my answer.”

“Why are you here?” the angel Esaphim demands. “I am not easily vanquished, I’ll have you know.”

“I want to know who stopped Armageddon.”

Their eyes widen. They’ve got a face that matches their architecture, all wide panes and high arches, and the surprise shows clearly on it. The Swiffer lowers. 

“The Antichrist did,” they say, slowly. “They missed their cue.”

Amphora nods. All right. It was important that the Antichrist, offspring of her Dark Lord, be human, because for the Great Plan to work humans had to be complicit in their own destruction. It might have seemed a footnote to anyone else, but in the nine circles a good footnote could make or break a contract, so it stayed. Humans are messy, though. Humans don’t go according to plan.

“Why couldn’t … it be started for them?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t there.”

She sighs. Angels aren’t creative enough to lie — normally — but that doesn’t mean they can’t be as unhelpful as they please.

They tuck the Swiffer away. “What does it matter to you?”

“Well, I quit my job and cancelled my Netflix subscription,” she points out, dryly. “And now I’ve got to live in an attic with _no_ roosting space. So. I’m — a little irritated with how events played out. I’m operating largely on spite right now.”

“I didn’t think your kind went in for gainful employment,” says Esaphim, owner of a yoga studio for vegans.

“Are you kidding?” Amphora gets drier. It takes effort. “Have you ever worked with takeaway — or in real estate? I condemned more souls to hell my first four months in an office than I did in all the years I skulked professionally in dark alleyways. Isn’t that why you have this place?”

“What is?”

“To save souls one-by-one by turning them onto the path of,” she works her mouth, like there’s sawdust in it. “Righteousness.”

Esaphim just stares at her.

“Why would we care about individuals?” they ask.

Amphora immediately forgets about the apocalypse. “Because each human is a victory?” she manages, once she's picked her jaw up off the ground. “Every human is worth winning? Were you not paying attention during the orientation speech?”

They wave this away. “The inefficient model.”

“ _Excuse_ me?”

“You’re not seeing the big picture. Some humans will always be lost. That’s beyond our ability to stop. But as long as the whole continues to be good, it’s acceptable shrink.”

“Sure, if you’re a _bitch.”_

“Yes,” Esaphim agrees patiently, as if Amphora is telling them water is wet and hell is hot. “We all are. We have to be. Do you truly think that our side doesn’t want to just wave our hands and solve all this? To _make_ humans be good to each other, the way the Almighty wants? To rid the Earth of suffering, and selfishness, and the great crime of apathy? But we can’t. Humans were given the knowledge between good and evil, and now our hands are tied. We _have_ to let them choose. So if our non-interference comes off as bastardly …” They shrug. “That’s not our fault.”

Amphora picks at her ear.

When Esaphim peeks at her for a reaction, they visibly contemplate murder before their face smooths out again.

“Better than you. Don’t you care about _anything?”_

“I’ve got a Roomba,” Amphora answers promptly. “When it traps itself in a corner and can’t maneuver its way out, it starts beeping loudly to signal it needs to be rescued. Sometimes I trap it on purpose.”

“I don’t know what I expected,” they scoff.

Amphora waits for a beat, then takes aim. “So why can’t we go to Soho?”

They go still.

It’s only a second’s hesitation, but Amphora’s ears sweep forward and her lips come off her teeth, triumphant.

“You _do_ know!” She advances on them. “It’s not just us! You and your kind aren’t allowed there either! Why not!”

They sigh. “Get out your phone. I’m going to AirDrop you something.”

“Are you allowed to do that?” she asks, but rhetorically; her phone’s already in her hand. 

Damn.nation’s the first thing that loads as soon as she thumbs it awake. A glance at it reminds her she hasn’t secured a soul yet — and since damned souls are what the nine circles use to power their lights and, more importantly, their Wifi, this could become critical if they’re all behind. 

A notification pops up, an icon unfurling its dove-white wings. “Esaphim Standing Would Like To Share This.” She rolls her eyes, and taps Open.

Somehow — 

— _stupidly_ — 

— she isn’t expecting it at all, and so when the video loads and throws an image of heaven across her screen, the immediate familiarity takes her by the throat and garrotes her clean through. She puts a hand out behind her, steadies herself on an equipment rack.

One, two — four angels. Three against one.

“It’s a trial,” says Esaphim, needlessly.

Kneejerk, Amphora shakes her head. “No, it isn’t. Your kind don’t do trials. We never got — there were no _trials_ for us, no — hearings — no _nothing.”_

“That’s different,” they sneer. “You Fell. Cast out.”

“I did not,” she says, quiet. “I quit.”

The audio’s nearly muted, partially due to her phone’s settings and partially because the video was taken from a distance, but that doesn’t matter to ears like Amphora’s, except —

“Hang on,” she straightens up. “This is from Dietrich’s tablet.”

“What?”

“Dietrich. He’s one of the Disposable Demons — we call him Triple D, they’ve got an alphanumeric system to distinguish — it doesn’t matter. This is from his tablet.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Just because you think your body is a temple doesn’t mean the rest of us have to live with its limitations,” Amphora says archly, and does a few pointed swiveling motions with her ears. Esaphim gives her a sour look. “But — what’s he doing in _heaven?”_

“For the trial,” they say again. “On Sunday. Didn’t your lot have a trial for yours then, too?”

Amphora tilts her head. Abruptly, she remembers the way Beezlebub’s face had changed, saying, _we’ve been betrayed,_ like it was only just occurring to her. She remembers her commanding officer, prevaricating, saying, _results were inconclusive._

Of course, she thinks dazedly, of course. If you need to influence a human, even only a partial one, who better than a demon?

“Probably,” she admits, trying to find steady footing on this revelation. “But I wasn’t paying attention. They’re not that interesting. Even the executions get kind of same-y.”

“Well, you’re going to want to watch this.”

As if on cue, the camera pans over, and Amphora yelps.

“ _Hellfire!”_

A vortex of flame stretches from floor to vaulted ceiling. It’s so jarring, so alien, that it takes her a moment to register that one of the angels is gesturing imperiously — Gabriel, of course it’s Gabriel, who didn’t frequently bother with back entrances like 7B North but came through often enough that it’s no effort at all, conjuring the sense memory of his forehead under her hand — and the renegade’s stepping forward. One, then another.

Her jaw drops. “You can’t _burn_ him!”

“Of course we can,” Esaphim says flatly.

The angel half-turns to say something, and for the first time, she gets a good look at his face, and —

— she recognizes him.

She _knows_ him. That’s!

That’s —

+++

It was 1845 before Amphora made it out of the nine circles and felt the sunlight on her face again. By then, hansom cabs had become the newfangled thing in London, and she accomplished Satan’s work almost purely by hanging around people most like herself: pugnacious old women who clucked their tongues about everything. Specifically, this time, it was about reckless speed and those covered tops; who knows what kind of _untoward_ behavior one could get up to in a dark, private place like that — as if anyone ever got into a vehicle for any purpose other than to get to another location with as little discomfort as could be managed. Nobody would think to worry about it until _you_ planted the suggestion into their heads.

Their souls were easy to corrupt. It took so little encouragement. After all, nothing is further from godliness than vaulting yourself high so you can judge the godliness of other people.

It was a good thing, too, because Amphora’s body was new and kept moving in ways she didn’t intend it to, and breaking thousands of years of angelic habit couldn’t be done overnight. Everything was step, overcorrect, step again, and all the while her senses pummeled and beat and battered her. The surface was crowded, noisy, full of bodies that sweated and oozed and made even grosser noises than the third circle of hell after lunch.

For a brief time, the most tolerable part of it all was the bookshop; a wedge-shaped building not far from Piccadilly Circus where a traffic conductor hollered himself hoarse outside, as apparently no one could approach a three-way stop with sense or reason. 

Bookshops are great places to inspire heretical thoughts. Amphora developed a sixth sense for when it was open — its hours of operation being more of a suggestion than a reality — just by the feeling coming off of it, of people encountering ideas anathema to their ingrained beliefs. The proprietor was a squinty, suspicious man with no other real distinguishing characteristics, and once he’d determined where to pigeonhole Amphora (her tastes were prurient and blasphemous in those early days, as the novelty of reading a misprinted Bible hadn’t worn off yet,) he was content to ignore her and she him.

“Ma’am,” he’s say, upon her entrance, and she’d say, “Master Fell,” and that would be that.

In fact, the only unsettling thing about it was that Amphora always put the books back. Leaving a store in worse condition than you found it is the height of evil, second only to using the shoulder to cut off other motorists in traffic, but she never felt compelled to do that there. In fact, she felt pretty strongly compelled _not_ to.

It was the quiet, she remembers. For just a little bit, everything was quiet, and there was no one in her personal space.

It wore off eventually. She stopped needing the crutch.

“You cannot stay here, you know that,” Mr. Fell told her, that last time, in such an exquisitely polite voice that Amphora closed the bad Bible and passed it up to him without meaning to. He’d taken his hat off, and his hair was like a matchstick just lit; a candleflame of white.

As she stood, the expression on his face cracked at the corner.

“There’s nothing for you in those,” he said to her, with such unconscious cruelty that it circles around until it becomes something almost gentle again.

And Amphora agreed, “Probably not,” and left.

+++

The shop, she remembers suddenly, had been in Soho.

+++

“What was his name?” she hears herself say.

“Aziraphale.”

Her eyebrows jump. Maybe she’d lose her own game — angel, or prescription cream for one’s unmentionables? She thought she knew the whole host of heaven; she had to call them by name in order to bid them welcome and anoint them, and she had a lot of spare time to spend memorizing.

“And he survived this?” The screen still shows a towering inferno.

She can tell Triple D was striving to stay unobtrusive while filming, and doesn’t blame him; a Disposable Demon in heaven would be doubly targeted. So the angle isn’t quite right, but Amphora can see the edge of the angel’s face, and the look there is the same one he wore when confronted with small children with sticky hands near his books: irritated, and cuttingly, politely contemptuous.

“He did,” Esaphim steps around her, encroaching close enough on her personal space that Amphora jerks back entirely without meaning to. “The host thought, well, if he couldn’t be destroyed by hellfire, then he must Fall, right? But he didn’t do that, either. He just … walked away. Neither angel nor demon.”

“Impossible,” Amphora says immediately. There’s no such thing.

Esaphim shrugs.

She swallows. “Do you know why — why he did it? Thwarted us? Thwarted you?”

“To ask the motive for insurrection is to give it a platform,” they respond, stiffly, meaning no. “But he didn’t act alone.”

“I didn’t recognize him.”

“You wouldn’t have,” they keep moving. “He only ever used the main entrance.”

Amphora frowns, edging further away. There’s something … it’s not right.

She pauses. “I never told you where I was stationed.”

Then — 

It clicks.

She looks down.

There, directly under the heel she was about to set down, is a chalk line. Light shimmers faintly across it, awakening to her proximity.

Exorcism circle.

She hits the ceiling. Esaphim screams with fury. She scrambles for traction and gets her trainers wedged into place. Thank Satan for making the middle-aged consumer the most hateful demographic, she thinks, scuttling backwards across the ceiling, as far from that circle as she can get; they’ve got the most sensible shoes.

Abandoning all pretense, Esaphim lunges at her, their eyes blazing.

Amphora drops, twisting in midair and barely missing a blow. It passes close enough to raise the hair on her neck, hot and holy.

“Demon!” they howl. “Traitorous, black-winged filth!”

Her feet hit the ground. She whirls, dragging in a deep breath, and this time when Esaphim hurtles themself towards her for another strike, she opens her throat and barks a concussive burst of sound into their face. The reverb makes the windows rattle.

It doesn’t work so well on those that don’t have a bat’s unique way of interpreting sound, but Amphora’s had a good century to practice, and Esaphim’s not expecting it. They recoil mid-leap. Their face shows terror, convinced of the image that Amphora spun from sound and planted into their brain, of the Archangel Gabriel with sword in hand and a hundred eyes all open to witness judgment.

It’ll only take a moment before it clears, but by then Amphora’s already pelted down the stairs and out onto the street.

+++

When Amphora Fell, she made a crater half-a-mile wide at the edge of the methane fields.

She hadn’t been able to appreciate it at the time, on account of the Falling and the cratering and such, but the fields were a stunning sight: all these huge, interconnected black lakes, with long chains of methane bubbles frozen underneath their surface like pearls on a string, dropping down into the deep. Aesthetically, she would still probably pick them over the boiling sulphur pits.

(It might surprise you to know that the old adage about the frequency of frost in hell simply isn’t true. Some places in hell freeze over regularly, and there are bits on the outward edge that never left permafrost. Best not to think about what might come up if they do.)

But methane ignites when met with fire, as Amphora shortly found out, lying there smashed to bits with her feathers smoldering and the ice melting under her.

Everything became really quite awful, after that.

Her first memory, once the pain was over, was a voice saying, “Well, you don’t see that every day.”

And then it said, “Up you get, fledgling.”

And then it was a hand under her elbow — or where her elbow had been, as Amphora at that point didn’t have any more corporeal consistency than an imp, just ash and a vague impression of a self — and it pulled her to her feet. “There you go. See? We’ve all been where you are now.”

It said, “It’s not so bad. You’d be surprised what you can adjust to.”

It said, “Just do as we do.”

So Amphora did what they did: she flopped and bruised at the mud, she slithered through the slop, she beat her wings against the dirt until her feathers came back in and finally, she found a creature to inhabit. She broke its bones and stretched its flesh until she had a rag-bone body she could jerkily animate. 

Most demons, lurching about for their first bodies, got the insects, as they were easiest to subdue: flies and roaches and earwigs. Earless earthworms, like Smalls. Snakes, toads, and lizards were also easy fits, but you could find it all in the nine circles: hounds and horses, midges and magpies. Fallen angels, once uniformly the same, now walking and talking and smiling a hundred thousand different eerie handmade smiles.

Amphora trained herself to use her bat body, and trained herself to file paperwork, and trained herself not to flinch at the proximity of all that flesh.

But no one called her fledgling again, not after that first voice.

Eventually she applied for a voucher from Allocation Services and went to the surface. She did what demons did.

+++

It’s Wednesday, and —

(— and the interesting thing you might want to know about this Wednesday is that the Earth is four months, one week, two days, fourteen hours, and thirty-six minutes away from its six thousandth and twenty-third birthday, which is exactly one minute less than it should have been, because on Saturday the demon Crowley stopped time completely in order to give himself, the angel Aziraphale, and Adam Young, the Antichrist, a much-needed pause to collect their wits. So on this Wednesday, and every other day that is to come, everyone will be exactly one minute late for everything, but it won’t _technically_ be their fault.)

— and Amphora’s in a posh bar before the evening’s even started, getting hit on by a humanity that is neither as obliterated, starved, pestilential, or as dead as it should be. She hasn’t had a chance to decide yet if she’s disappointed about it, because an angel tried to vanquish her in Kensington this morning and it was a little upsetting, but she finds she’s coming to a firmer conclusion with every word this one particular man manages to drip in her direction.

His mouth is talking at her, but so are his muscles, his stomach, that dark place right behind his heart that he’ll forget about until he suddenly doesn’t forget about it anymore. It tells her he was relieved when Marge miscarried.

“— I’m telling you,” he hiccups. “The French aren’t lying when they call it a little death —“

His eyes are habitually squinted, his whole face round and flush and pink.

_Porcine,_ Amphora thinks, and then, _made in the image of the Almighty, as all of them are, and made powerful because of it._

Then, behind him — 

A flash of something, moving past the door. Pale, fawn-colored coat, and bright candletip hair, like a matchstick just lit.

She cranes over the back of her stool, which is unhelpfully steel and minimalistic, trying to keep it in sight.

He leans in her way. “It’s what angels must feel when they fall, don’t you think, sweetheart?”

“No, it’s not,” Amphora says, rising. “Mostly it just felt easy.”

Then, with a distracted flap of her hand to miracle something in the direction of her tab, she’s out the door and onto the street, swinging left and then right. Humans swirl all around her; the cacophony of them batters her ears, the shouts and the honking and the furious tattle-tale thundering of their hearts, and it takes her a moment to clear them.

— there!

She turns sideways, and darts across the road. That’s him, she’s certain of it. The bookkeeper, the angel in disguise. The one who told her she didn’t need God. Walking along ahead, side-by-side with —

— with — 

“— do have one at home,” the demon Crowley is saying. “I know, I’ve seen it under all those crates. You could make these things yourself.”

“Why would I do that?” replies the angel Aziraphale.

“For the satisfaction? Just to be able to boast,” he removes a hand from his pocket — with difficulty, Amphora’s seen vacuum-sealed packages tighter than those jeans — and gestures with it. “‘Made these myself, I did! From scratch! Oh, no, it wasn’t hard, whyever would you ask.’”

“Sounds like work.”

“ _Fiddly_ work,” Crowley stresses. “Your favorite kind.”

“Hm. You have me there.” Aziraphale walks with his hands folded in front of him like he’s merely holding onto them until someone else can come and retrieve them. “But I have no interest in learning to make these dishes on their own. That defeats the point.”

“Which is?”

“The human investment, of course.”

Amphora swivels her ears towards him, standing on tiptoe. He doesn’t _look_ Fallen.

But she burned down to ash, the first time — felt every second of it, and now hellfire can’t hurt her the same way. And she stood there with that phone inches from her face, watching the angel burn, burn, burning and _untouchable._ He has to be a demon, he _has_ to be. Right?

“Something that’s been made with love, or at the very least great affection, tastes completely different,” Aziraphale explains, very not-demonically, “than something that’s merely been cooked. I can feel it, for one, if a dish is made with love — love for the recipe and the heritage of it, for the act of making, or out of affection for me.”

A beat.

“And I can _also_ tell when you’re rolling your eyes, Crowley, your shades don’t protect you nearly as much as you think.”

Crowley, of course, promptly shoves his sunglasses up his nose, and mutters.

“Remember how the Almighty made the sunsets, in the beginning?” Aziraphale continues, and Amphora almost trips. “We thought She’d get tired of it — all those colors, over and over and over again, the same way every day. Humans are like Her, but smaller. They keep making food, again and again, and they keep loving it.”

They’re walking single-file now as the street narrows, leaving no room for them to walk abreast without being rude. He keeps half-turning to speak, forcing Crowley to prod him to keep moving.

“Is that why we were there?” Crowley sweeps a hand in the direction they came from. “I wondered! It didn’t seem at all your usual standard.”

“That’s Anais, and she’s never made a sundae she doesn’t love.”

“It _was_ good,” Crowley allows, and Aziraphale’s whole face lifts with his responding smile.

“ _Wasn’t_ it? Imported gelato from Italy is well and fine, but it wouldn’t have tasted half as good as what Anais makes. To me, anyway.” A beat, and his smile softens. “Also, I am very fond of those little peanut butter M&Ms you can sprinkle on top.”

“Peanut M&Ms? You?”

“Peanut _butter_ M&Ms, there’s a difference.”

“Really?”

“I tried to share them with you,” Aziraphale insists. “They’re ingenious!”

They turn onto a busier street. It’s a long summer’s night, twilight settling in the places where the buildings grew long, and the foot traffic makes it difficult to keep up with them. Amphora quickens her pace, wanting to hang back far enough not to be detected by supernatural senses but still use her own to eavesdrop.

“— and now you think I’m being ridiculous.”

Crowley rocks his head back. “ _No,”_ he says, with emphasis, and then shows teeth. “What I _think_ is that it was almost sinful, the way you enjoyed it.”

Aziraphale does something very deliberate and arched with his eyebrows.

“I would suspect you of mocking me,” he says, “but I think you might be paying me a compliment. In your own way.”

“In my own way,” Crowley echoes.

They smile at each other, but miss: Aziraphale darts him a crinkled, sidelong look, and Crowley looks back, weak in the mouth, only after he’s turned away again.

“Still,” Crowley drags in a deep breath. “I thought your kind didn’t go in much for the individual investment. Isn’t it all about the whole symphony,” his lilts his voice up, in near-perfect mimicry of how Esaphim had sounded this morning. “And not the single performance? Some parts can go sour, so long as it all plays the tune you want?”

“Then isn’t it a good thing you and I have motive, now, to care about every little piece of the world?”

Slowly, Crowley’s hackles go down. “Sounds like fiddly work.”

And Aziraphale replies, “Which you keep insisting you don’t like, but I think you do.”

“All right, I’ll bite. We’ve done best sundae. You've told me, ad nauseum, about best sushi. Where’s the best pastry?”

It earns him an immediate, scandalized look. “ _Please_ narrow that down.”

He must do, because there’s an exchange that Amphora can’t follow — a mix of places, restaurant names, chef names, and a lot of syllables she thinks is supposed to be food — and her head starts to hurt.

“Best sausage roll?”

“Gregg’s,” Aziraphale says instantly. “On the Strand. But only on Thursday mornings, Emily’s the baker and she cut back to part time, sadly.”

“You do realize,” Crowley says, in a voice that’s doing nearly as much smiling as his mouth is. “That’s four names you remembered well enough to recite back to me, but when I asked which king had your portrait done in a funny hat, you conveniently drew a blank.”

“Hm. Still can’t recall. Must not have been one of the memorable ones.”

“But Emily who works at Gregg’s is.”

“You haven’t had her sausage rolls,” he points out, smugly, and somewhere in the privacy of her own imagination, Amphora flips Esaphim Standing the bird.

Ahead of her, they cross the street, washing up on a narrow island in the middle of a three-way intersection. It’s the kind of London traffic knot only navigable by black cab drivers who undergo strenuous training for the right and privilege to go hurtling through those turns at breakneck speed. Almost every other motorist panics.

The light changes, stranding them.

“Ah, but you weren’t there for that,” Aziraphale is saying, in response to something Crowley asked.

“Yes, I was!”

“No, you weren’t. You don’t like the sea, haven’t since the ark. You say it’s bad for your scales.”

“I assure you,” Crowley says, with exaggerated solemnity. “I was there. You stole that woman’s lobster sandwich.”

“I — oh, that one!” Aziraphale goes on the defensive. “Well! She wasn’t appreciating it!”

“You didn’t have to _rob_ her.”

“Yes, I did!”

He fumes. Crowley’s leaning on him, elbow propped on his shoulder in order to achieve a state of maximum lounge while they wait. He tugs his sunglasses down his nose far enough to check the traffic lights.

“It was £24,” he points out, after a beat. “And you were a seagull.”

“ _Wasted,”_ Aziraphale insists. “It would have been a _crime.”_

This makes Crowley laugh, and Amphora’s ears twitch toward the sound entirely against her will. She shifts her weight; there’s a peculiar feeling in her, like something under her feet is moving even though she knows she’s standing still.

Aziraphale smiles at the pavement. 

“You know,” he says, without looking. “I’ve never asked. What’s the equivalent for your people?”

Crowley thinks about this, budging up as one mad pedestrian makes a break for it against the light and briefly joins them on their island before plunging forward. “I don’t think we have one,” he says, and winces at the long blare of a horn. “Seagulls are kind of demonic on their own, you know? They don’t need much input from us. If they could choose — well, they can’t really choose, can they, their brains aren’t —“

“Crowley.”

“Hm?”

“I meant. If everything I do is an indulgence that my people would frown upon, then what’s it for yours?”

He shrugs. “We do plenty of indulging. It’s in the job description.”

“I’m aware of that,” Aziraphale says patiently. “But when you indulge in _everything,_ then nothing is extravagant. What do you do for extravagance?” He turns slightly under Crowley’s arm, and persists, “What’s so off-limits for demons you can’t imagine being allowed to have it?”

Crowley is quiet for a long, long time.

The traffic light still doesn’t change.

Finally, his throat works.

“Well. If you must know.” He crooks a finger, just so, to touch Aziraphale’s cheek with only the edge of his knuckle. “There’s just the one thing, isn’t there?”

And Amphora knows immediately — instinctively — demonically — 

— _exactly_ what he means. 

Aziraphale’s only a split-second behind her. His eyes go round, and dart up — heavenward. 

They hook there only briefly, then come back down, and one hand comes up to catch Crowley’s against the side of his face, holding it there. He draws in a breath like he’s preparing to speak — and blows it out again. His eyes drop, come back, and —

Oh, surely he’s _not._

But he is. He’s telegraphing it plainly.

“You don’t have to,” Crowley says, fast. His voice is so thin there’s no air to it at all.

And —

“Yes, I do,” says Aziraphale, righteous and divine, and he kisses Crowley on the mouth.

A beat passes.

Another.

Then everything — 

— _moves._

The traffic, the pedestrians, the lights — go lurching into motion as if a rubber band, held taut, had suddenly snapped.

Another horn blares. A shoulder bashes into Amphora’s, and her many-toothed snarl is met with a startled yelp. Someone shouts a rude thing about someone else’s progenitor. Crowley’s hand is white-knuckled against the back of Aziraphale’s neck.

And for a moment — only a moment — the rush of noise turns to a cacophony inside her bat brain and scrambles her senses, and the men in front of her, standing on each other’s feet, are no more and no less than any other human who’s ever touched their mouths to another’s for the joy of it; made in the image of the Almighty, just like the rest.

But of course that’s not true, and when at last they part, they’re an angel and a demon again, breathing against each other’s mouths.

Crowley clears his throat. Does it again. On the third try, manages words.

“Good?”

Aziraphale hums. “Mmhmm,” he allows. “But not as good as peanut butter M&Ms.”

“Ah. Well.” He peels away. “What could be?”

His voice suddenly sounds like it’s made of matchsticks; splintered, easily flammable. Amphora and Aziraphale hear it at the same time. His eyes snap open. They focus, sharpening, and he sidesteps to block Crowley’s retreat, catching hold of his shirt under his jacket.

“Crowley —“

“You’re right, of course. No, look at me, I’m not arguing.”

“ _Stop_ that. That’s not — it isn’t — ” he tries, then stops himself and takes a breath. “What I’m saying, is that it’s not in the same category. It’s the kind of thing you save for special occasions. You’d be spoiled, otherwise.”

“Oh.”

“Indeed.”

“How — how special are we talking?” Crowley says, all low urgency. “How — anniversaries? Solar eclipses? Geological events?”

“Oh, Crowley.” Aziraphale starts to laugh.

His hands move from Crowley’s shirt to snag his face, holding it still for another kiss.

“There’s no rush,” he says in little more than a whisper. No one’s meant to hear it, but Amphora’s not no one. “Don’t you want to take your time?”

To this, plaintively: 

“ _No.”_

“You’ll just have to trust me, then,” Aziraphale says — 

— and then does something that clearly shocks them both.

He turns Crowley’s jaw to kiss the place just beneath his ear. It’s different, this time — and somehow, somehow, this is what unsettles Amphora more than all the rest of it. It’s a kiss that knows it’s one of a hundred more just like it. It’s the way you kiss someone who’s in your personal space and you _don’t mind_ having them there, not in the slightest.

And something inside Amphora — 

— something she hadn’t even known was suspended there —

— _drops._

The plummeting feeling goes all the way through her. It carries her downward. She’s on her knees before she knows it, hunching against it — the sudden hard battering inside of her, like something winged and careening — it — it could drive her right through the pavement, and it would, if she let it. She could Fall forever.

It was — it —

It had been a thousand, several thousand _years_ she had stood within arm’s reach of another angel — eternally paired together, the waterbearer and the anointer. The doormen to heaven. And not once, not for one single moment in all those endless, ticking seconds could she have imagined reaching across that distance — to _touch_ them — willingly! — for the sole purpose of offering comfort. She couldn’t even imagine _wanting_ to.

So _this — ?_

To see one of her own — ? Someone who _chose_ not to be — ? 

Aping human behavior, with an _angel?_

It’s Beezlebub’s voice, the quiet disbelief. It’s Dietrich, disposable, disseminating a video he knows might get him annihilated for sharing it, just so someone else could see.

Doubt feels so much like falling. She’d forgotten, somewhere along the line, just how it takes hold of you.

The last time she’d hit the ground and laid there in smoking ruins after all that methane ignited, there’d been a hand there for her, taking her by the elbow and pulling her to her feet. _Up you get, fledgling,_ and Amphora hasn’t stopped following that command. She gets up. Her hands fall away from her ears. Traffic rematerializes around her — pedestrians, motorists, the heartbeats of buildings and the hue and cry of the birds in the long twilight —

— and the demon Crowley, looking right at her.

The angel Aziraphale is a distant figure now, visible only by the candletip flare of his hair through the moving bodies, but Crowley’s stationary in the midst of it all. His eyes are yellow, unblinking, and under their scrutiny Amphora draws herself up to her full height.

“Fledgling,” he says, and it’s tectonic, the shift this makes inside of her, as her memories reposition and settle into place with glacial inevitability. Of course, she thinks, of course. She came to _London._ “I thought we told you all to leave us alone.”

Her ears lift. She listens — his muscles, his scales, his heart.

She bares her fangs.

A beat.

“Ah. Nobody sent you. Good.” And then he bares his back.

+++

It had been so sudden.

That’s what she remembers most. How sudden it had been — or as sudden as anything seems after millennia of the same, unchanging thing.

Something in the way the light moved, the sun across the heavens piercing through the stairwell like a sword thrust into the stone at her feet, and Amphora had looked at it, then looked at the waterbearer who was trying some new fashion with their nose hairs, and that was it. That was just _it._

And once you make the decision to _be_ something instead of just letting things happen to you, there’s no way to go back.

You cannot un-be.

_Up you get, fledgling._

_It’s not so bad, really. You’d be surprised what you adjust to._

_Just do as we do._

Amphora opens her eyes. Croaks into the darkness and lets the echoes come bouncing back to her, arranging into the image of the wooden beams directly over her head and the roofing tiles she keeps trying to arrange into furniture. The Roomba beeps its way towards her inquisitively.

_Do as we do._

She pushes herself up onto her elbow. Reaches up and shoves her hair behind her ear.

Her chest aches.

_Do as we do._

The Roomba bumps against her. It beeps in confusion, before pivoting into a quarter-turn to politely scoot out of the way. Amphora takes a deep breath, then swoops down. Her kiss gently brushes the top of its console.

-  
fin

**Author's Note:**

> If you, like I, really want to watch a bunch of university students light frozen methane on fire, there's a [YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YegdEOSQotE) for you. Also, you can find me on [tumblr](https://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/).


End file.
